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list price: $22.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Biography & Autobiography
published: May 2021
ISBN:9781988298788
publisher: Freehand Books

The Bridge

Writing Across the Binary

by Keith Maillard

tagged: lgbt, gender studies, personal memoirs
Description

One writer's deeply compelling story of growing up nonbinary in the 1940s and '50s

As a child, Keith Maillard asked his mother and grandmother, over and over again, "Am I a boy, or am I a girl?" Neither "boy" nor "girl" quite fit. But there were no other options.

In this stunning memoir, Maillard creates an intricate collage of childhood memories, exploring the contradictory and destructive forces at work that put his very life at risk. For young Keith, writing proved to be a way to fight against what the world was telling him. In his scribbled stories, he began to spot the faintest glimmer that things could be different. And he kept fighting for years -- decades -- until he found a new understanding of his own nonbinary identity.

The Bridge reveals the dangers of the gender binary, both for those who are outside it and for those who aren't. And it offers hope for a kinder future for all who dare to say "no" to the way that we do gender.

About the Author

Keith Maillard is the author of thirteen novels, including Two Strand River, Alex Driving South, Motet, Hazard Zones, Gloria, The Clarinet Polka, and Difficulty at the Beginning, his four-volume Bildungsroman. He has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (Motet) and was shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Literary Prize (Hazard Zones) and the Governor General's Literary Awards (Gloria). The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. His poetry collection, Dementia Americana, won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1995 for the Best First Book of Poetry Published in Canada.

Keith was born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, the inspiration for the fictional town of Raysburg, which serves as the setting for many of his novels. He has been a musician, a contributor for CBC Radio, a freelance photographer and journalist, and a designer of distance education courses. His reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in many journals, ranging from Event to Flare. He is currently chair of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. He lives in West Vancouver with his wife and two daughters.

The Globe and Mail called Difficulty at the Beginning "a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century." Be sure to check out all four volumes—Running, Morgantown, Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes, and Looking Good—now available as e-books!

Please visit Keith online at keithmaillard.com. You can also find him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter at @keithmaillard.

Contributor Notes

Keith Maillard is the author of fourteen novels. He has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Literary Prize and the Governor General's Literary Awards. He grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and has lived for many years in Vancouver, where he teaches creative writing at UBC.

Editorial Review

"Keith Maillard is one of the finest English-language novelists in Canada today . . . The Bridge is a moving and honest memoir about growing up gender-odd . . . Highly recommended." - Vancouver Sun

"A vulnerable and vital memoir about the search for identity and belonging outside the restrictive masculine gender norms of 1950s America. Novelist Keith Maillard's journey to locate himself as nonbinary in 'a narrative of gender' that had long excluded him is a valuable addition to literature about the lives and histories of trans and nonbinary people." - Rachel Giese, author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man

"Through constellated fragments of memory, key moments in twentieth-century America, and the unfolding of an acclaimed literary life, The Bridge is the forthright, deeply moving memoir of a nonbinary writer coming of age and coming to self. Intimate and expansive in equal measure, this story speaks with particular generosity to all of us who've been deemed 'too much' or 'too little' in our gender expression, as much by those who loved us as by those who despised us. This is a book that will stay with you long after its final lines, in all the very best ways." - Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

"Keith Maillard's engaging memoir about gender and the writing life is a tender and moving portrait of a writer's journey towards understanding themselves and their work." - Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

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